One of my repeated arguments with the FCO was that torture is not just immoral. but fouls up the intelligence stream with highly dubious material. In my Ambassadorial telegram to then Secretary of State Jack Straw of 22 July 2004, I made the following points:
We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror…
In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of this practice…
I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN Convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the then CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think that there is any doubt about the fact…
..this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, and they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.
I do urge you to read the full telegram if you have not already done so:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/documents/Telegram.pdf
I think my next point about the Butler inquiry showing the intelligence services prefer their material sensational, was a particularly good blow.
The New Yorker has pioneered in reporting on extraordinary rendition, and the latest effort by Jane Mayer refers to Khalil Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to every crime that he or his CIA torturers had ever heard of, including the murder of Daniel Pearl:
A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, ‘The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.’ Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, ‘I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.’ She added, ‘I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical’they didn’t believe it.’
Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed’and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film ‘A Mighty Heart”said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. ‘K.S.M.’s name never came up,’ he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, ‘My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.’
http://www.newyorker.com:80/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer
Meanwhile, the rats are deserting the sinking ship. Now that Iraq is such a disaster that nobody now argues that life for ordinary Iraqis is better than it was five years ago, everyone is anxious to pretend that they were against the war all the time, really, honest. Even the security services are now sending out weasel signals through their pet journalists.
Security Correspondents are amongst the worst denizens of the media, because they are so dependent on the security services feeding them tidbits to retail that they are terrified of offending them. Frank Gardner of the BBC is an especially bad example. His “This is a mock-up what a terrorist chemical weapon vest at Forest Gate might look like” was possibly the worst bit of journalism I have ever seen.
Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian is another such. When I was astonished to wake up one day and see that the British government had published a totally fake map of the Iran/Iraq border, in relation to the sailors captured by the Iranians, and that the media were buying the fake map, I phoned Richard Norton-Taylor. I was offering a major scoop, free. He didn’t want to know.
So I published on this blog – and had 60,000 hits, and the entry repeated all over the web.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/03/captured_marine.html
The Mail then published an expanded version, and got a great reaction. I genuinely believe that making it public knowledge that our map was fake, helped to put Tony Blair back in his box and allowed diplomacy to get the captives released.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/07/british_map_in.html
All of which was ignored by Norton-Taylor because he preferred to side with his security service contacts. It is worth noting that every time I was brought on the the BBC to say the map was a fake, the government put up against me “Sir” Alan West, who told a load of patent lies about the boundary on the government’s behalf, including the extraordinary lie that the Iran/Iraq maritime boundary had been settled by an agreement beyween the UK and Iran. I am quite sure that a number of questions about that impossible assertion occur to you reading that now. Not one of those questions occurred to any BBC “Journalist” interviewing Sir Alan.
At the time, Sir Alan was presented as a retired Admiral and independent expert. Just a few weeks later he now re-emerges as a much higher paid liar as our Minister for Locking Up Bearded Men Without Trial. I may have got the offical title a bit wrong, but the appointment of an unelected military man as a minister in charge of “Domestic security” is a development so sinister I cannot believe the lack of concern shown by the media. But then of course, it is the fiefdom of their security correspondents.
Which brings me back to Norton Taylor. MI6 are now using him to claim that they were against the Iraq war all the time, and were overruled by that awful Bush and Blair:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2141372,00.html
I have no doubt they were against the war, in the sense that they would rather we hadn’t done it. But did they refuse to compile the dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which they knew full well was untrue? No, and John Scarlett who actually compiled it is now head of MI6. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into the disastrous “War on Terror”, embraced torture and the other new techniques, and lapped up the extra funding and prestige it gave them. Did MI6 ever give plainly worded advice to the Cabinet that they were against the war? No – in fact they permitted the Cabinet to be fed the opposite impression. Has a single member of MI6 resigned over the War? No.
I am not unhappy to see rats leave a sinking ship. But to try to pretend they were never on board…
I don't think anyone should be surprised by the latest moves from MI6. After all, dissimulation and deception, smoke and mirrors are all part of their stock in trade. Add to that the huge and relentless politicisation of the Civil Service, including the Security Service, and one has little difficulty in predicting precisely what the mandarins will get up to next. It's now all about self-preservation and maintaining the substantial pension rights.
It can't have been much more than ten or so years ago when attitudes were profoundly different. The concept of service to the nation has been subverted by (nominal) political allegiance. All of this stems from the top, the political masters who set the tone, the standards of behaviour, the culture.
I did get the impression at the time that there was considerable opposition to the war from within the security services, especially amongst the analysts. One or two retired analysts appeared on tv programmes at the time obviously speaking on behalf of quite a few of their still serving friends.
Then of course there were whores like Scarlett who got his promotion in exchange for lying. I'm sure MI6 is not now a happy – or efficient – place to live with him in charge of it.
Once, a couple of years ago, I was interviewed by someone who claimed to be a journalist, but whose work I have never seen anywhere, on the web or in print, before or since. The article in connection with which this person was supposedly interviewing me never appeared anywhere, either and they never responded to my e-mails, saying, 'hello, nice to have met you, etc.' The 'journalist' openly taped the interview, as is normal. At some point in such interviews, I often bring the conversation – my monologue, usually – around to current international politics and talk in strong terms about the US-UK axis, in order to see what their reaction will be – I watch them, just as they are watching me – as maybe these postings will be (hello there again!) and there is a certain bodily reaction which fake journalists have which real ones (or at least ones not on a security/intelligence service payroll, etc.) don't have – and this one had it in spades. Not very scientific, I know! But it's happened enough times, in different countries, for me to feel able to gauge – as far as is possible – who is real and who is not. Though of course, it may be that the really effective ones are too good at hiding this type of thing… so my incipient paranoia continues, unabated.
Much erudite discourse around this topic has appeared in the excellent 'Lobster' magazine and in some of the mainstream print media.
Read hugely talented Scottish poet, Tom Leonard's 'The Unfair Cop' about a similar encounter he had with an undercover something-or-other. It's in 'Freedom Spring: Ten Years On', a book of South African and Scottish writers' work, which I co-edited in 2004/5 in connection with the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid in South Africa. I have no doubt that my 'friends' by the Thames and the Clyde will have read it – or jolly well ought to!!
Peace,
Suhayl